Trains

I breathe in the cool February air and shiver as it flows across my bare arms. I am waiting for someone and I’ve been for him every day since he hopped on that train and left my mom and me alone. He wrote me a letter telling me that he will be back. So I wait. Every day after school, I wait. Hopping that one day I will see the his smile as he steps off that train and comes home to us. I feel the train before I see it. It shakes the station’s concrete floor sending vibrations up my legs. He could be on this one. I hold my breath and send a silent prayer, but as I scan the stream of people all I see are strangers’ faces. I stand up, defeated, and grab my backpack from the cold metal bench I was sitting on. I start walking towards the parking lot when something catches my eye. A little boy is sitting all alone in the corner with no mom or dad in sight. Concerned, I walk over and ask, “Where are your parents.” He slowly looks up at me and I notice that he has stripes on his cheeks from where his tears had run down. He replies in a choked up voice that makes my heart ache, “Mama got real sick and had to go to sleep and Daddy left on the train, but he said he would come back.” I still have my mom, but this little boy has no one left to take care of him. I sat down next to him and we talked for a long time until my mom drove up and started yelling at me for not coming home on time and almost giving her a heart attack, but she stopped when she saw the little boy in the corner and I knew that she realized why I hadn’t come home. We all get left and abandoned in life that’s just how it works, but it doesn’t have to be a vicious cycle. My mom and I knew what it felt like to be abandoned and we were not going to leave this little boy alone. I still wait at the train station every day for my dad, but now I have a little boy that waits with me. A train may have taken my father away from me, but a train has also given me a little brother.

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